


Fear of Fire

by AdelaCathcart



Category: His Dark Materials (TV), His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman, The Book of Dust - Philip Pullman, The Collectors - Philip Pullman
Genre: And Implications, Barnard-Stokes Business, Experimental Theology, F/M, Flirting, Gen, Grooming, Inappropriate touching, Just Inappropriate Friendship, Mother/Daughter Unpleasantness, NO rape, No Incest, Origin Story, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-24
Updated: 2020-12-27
Packaged: 2021-03-08 03:47:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 5
Words: 20,030
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26639074
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AdelaCathcart/pseuds/AdelaCathcart
Summary: Sixteen-year-old Marisa van Zee spends the winter break at her mother's home in Paris, where she catches the eye of a charismatic and predatory experimental theologian. She'll put up with his advances if it allows her to steal his secrets and avoid time with her family, but he's more dangerous than she could have imagined, and what's worse, that only makes her like him more.
Relationships: Marisa Coulter/Gerard Bonneville
Comments: 47
Kudos: 36





	1. Maman

**Author's Note:**

> ἀντὶ πυρὸς γὰρ ἄλλο πῦρ  
> μεῖζον ἐβλάστομεν γυναῖ-  
> κες πολὺ δυσμαχώτερον.
> 
> “In exchange for fire we women  
> Were made, another fire, greater  
> Much harder to fight.”  
> Euripides, fr. 429

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> “Now Wendy was every inch a woman, though there were not very many inches.” —J.M. Barrie, _Peter Pan_

It’s a new apartment, stuffed with the same old furniture. When the Delamare family emigrated from Amsterdam, Maman’s dusty antiques tagged along for the fresh start: baroque chairs with threadbare needlepoint cushions, cloudy rococo mirrors with their cherubs flaking gilt, hand-painted lampshades over gaslights turned kindly low. Maman will insist these are heirlooms, but Marisa is old enough to recall being dragged to charity shops and auction houses, then-flaxen hair curled tightly and feet cramped in patent-leather shoes, charming the broker with her accented Dutch and baby-French before being sent to play so he and Maman could work out a deal behind closed doors. A few days later some new treasure would come home and everyone would agree that it had been in the family forever.

She’s also wise enough never to mention this.

It’s her first winter break at home in years, and the thought of vanishing from Oxford for six weeks without even a goodbye had amused her so much that she stood up her date for the end-of-semester dance and went directly to the aerodock after her Arabic exam, and as a result she’s arriving in Paris rather late at night. She’d warned Maman not to wait up, but when she lets herself in around eleven o’clock she’s only mildly surprised to find the parlor aglow in rosy lamplight, and the lady of the house entertaining.

Maman is precariously thin and very beautiful, never more so than when a man is present to behold her, and at the moment there are two. One is slouched boyishly in an armchair, and the other erect beside her on the sofa, and when she laughs at his joke her features become suddenly, luminously distinct, like a photogram in a solvent bath. Then she deigns to notice her daughter in the entryway, and her glamour trembles briefly out of focus. Her lizard dæmon flattens himself on the cool lacquer of the antique couch’s crest rail, and rolls his bulbous melancholy eyes despairingly skyward.

“Oh, Marisa, my dear heart, you’re finally here. Come give Mother a kiss,” Maman simpers, then takes her daughter’s hands in delicate fingers that bind like steel, and looks her up and down. “Goodness, don’t you look healthy! England certainly agrees with you.”

This is a slight against her weight, of course, carefully calculated to fly over the heads of her company. To spite her Marisa feigns obliviousness. “Thank you,” she says warmly. “You’re looking well too.” Maman scowls.

“Aren’t you sweet. You’ll want to freshen up, of course—your bedroom is just as you left it. Why don’t you go get settled in, and then you must take some wine with us, now that you’re so grown up.” The skeletal fingers reach up to caress Marisa’s cheek in a pantomime of tenderness. “Welcome home, darling.”

The room is nothing like she left it, of course, because she’s never really lived there in the first place, and the white-enameled hardware and the blowzy cabbage roses on the linens suggest the tastes of a much younger girl. Marisa has yearned for sophistication for as long as she’s known what it meant: the zephyrous breath of new experiences to be accumulated, the pleasure of endless expansion, to know everything and be everywhere at once. Her monkey dæmon unpacks her suitcase while she washes her face in the old-fashioned basin, changes into an ochre silk dress cut _à la garçonne_ , applies scent to her throat and color to her lips and fluffs her snow-kissed hair.

“We should sleep,” the monkey says doubtfully.

“I’m not at all tired,” Marisa lies, kicking the empty suitcase under the bed. She gathers him into her arms and his red-gold fur glows like embers against the muted saffron of her gown. He presses his goblin’s face into her hair, chattering assent.

When they return to the parlor, the man in the armchair is looking through a book with an air of amused disdain, and Maman has focused her attention on the other man like a pointer on a fallen duck. She introduces him without enthusiasm, warning Marisa he’s spoken for: “You remember M. Bertrand Garnier, the art dealer, don’t you, dear heart? He was a friend of your father’s, but of course you would’ve been very little… And this is his colleague, Dr. Bonneville.” Garnier is pouring wine for the little party, and after a perfunctory nod at Marisa as he passes her a glass he becomes immediately, pointedly absorbed in a conversation with her mother.

Marisa turns her attention to Bonneville, whom she’s clearly been conscripted to entertain. He’s a young man, perhaps about thirty, with curly black hair and dark, mischievous eyes. He’s dressed a little too informally in a burgundy sweater and corduroy slacks, good quality but worn smooth at the elbows and knees. His dæmon is a hyena sprawled sluttishly on the hearthrug. She raises her blunt drooling head to notice the monkey, and then turns to Bonneville with a look of unexpectedly pathetic devotion. He ignores her. Closing the book on his finger and uncoiling with a smirk, he greets Marisa in excellent English.

“When Mrs. Delamare mentioned her teenage daughter I expected a gawky little thing in short skirts, but you’re every inch a woman, aren’t you?”

The presumption of this remark takes her aback, but it thrills her, too. “So I’ve been led to believe, Mr. Bonneville,” she answers curtly.

He leans closer. “Oh, now, that won’t do at all. If you’re going to be really proper you must call me _Doctor_ Bonneville.”

“And what if I want to be really _im_ proper?”

“Well, then you must call me Gerard.”

“And you must call me Marisa.”

“Very well.”

“Tell me, Gerard, how do you know my mother?”

“Peripherally, Marisa, and with some reluctance. She’s quite a piece of work, your mother. I’m only here for propriety’s sake, as a favor to Garnier, or rather to his brother. I’m a chaperone, you see.” He cuts his eyes away to indicate the old people on the sofa. Maman has half-turned her back to Garnier, but her head is inclined towards him and her eyelashes flutter as he speaks low in her ear. He strokes her upper arm slowly with the back of his hand.

“You’re very candid,” Marisa mutters, disgusted. Her head is swimming. She’s drinking her wine too fast and she knows it, but she refuses to practice self-control alone in an atmosphere as licentious as this.

“Not really. What if I told you I only agreed to come for the chance to meet Mrs. Delamare’s beautiful daughter?”

“I’d think you were a shameless liar.”

“Think what you like,” Bonneville shrugs, recrossing his legs and returning his attention to his book. The hyena dæmon looks from the girl to the man and back, wagging her tail ingratiatingly.

The monkey, perched on the back of Marisa’s chair, knows better than to betray her mutinous thoughts, but she can feel his little fingers picking at the cushion, and she’s well aware of what he’d say if he could: _What a bore. We came all this way just to play her Galehaut._ Joyeux _fucking_ Noël _. I did try to warn you._

She throws back the dregs in her glass and is about to help herself to the bottle when Bonneville interrupts suddenly. “I think this wine has gone straight to my head,” he announces loudly in French. “I’d better have some coffee if I’m to be any use to anyone—no, please don’t get up”—here he winks at Marisa, for of course neither Maman nor Garnier has shown the slightest inclination to movement—“I believe there’s an all-night café just up the block, if, Mlle. Delamare, you would perhaps be good enough to accompany me?” Marisa is mystified, but the look of discomfort on her mother’s face is so priceless she can’t resist following Bonneville’s lead. She accepts his proffered hand.

“To have such energy!” Maman coos. “Take your time, my dears. Enjoy your youth.” She doesn’t even look at them.

“Thank you, Maman. Dr. Bonneville, would you help me with my coat?”

As he tucks the steel-blue Astrakhan around Marisa’s shoulders, Bonneville leans in so close the stubble on his jaw abrades her cheekbone, and she can smell his cologne, lotus and vetiver, the scent of things tangled beneath the surface. “It’s Gerard, remember,” he murmurs. 

In the foyer Bonneville pauses, pulls a pouch of smokeleaf from his breast pocket, and rolls a cigarette. He offers it to Marisa, and when she declines he shrugs and, accepting a light from the doorman, stuffs it between his lips while he fishes for his gloves. “Well, where shall we go?” he asks her from the unoccupied corner of his mouth. Smoke or steam blooms out along with the words.

“I thought you wanted coffee.”

“Oh, that. I suppose wouldn’t mind it, but first I’d like to stretch my legs some.” He looks up and down the street, sees the streetlights and restaurants and burghers to the left, scoffs and starts off right. “You don’t mind, do you?”

“What happened to your chaperone duties?”

“Bored of them. If Bertrand wants to destroy his marriage that’s his problem, isn’t it?”

Marisa’s stomach twists. “He’s _married_? But… poor Maman…”

“Excuse me, I was under the impression that your mother was married as well.”

“It’s a little more complicated than that…”

“I’m sure she can handle herself.” The ember on the end of his cigarette glows like a distant red eye.

They walk in silence through poorly-lit residential streets, past doormen and chauffeurs clearing snow from cobblestone walks, candles in the windows, the occasional sad little crèche. Marisa knows she should worry for her mother’s broken heart, but what she feels instead is hot pleasure, thin and rich like consommé—it serves her right, she can’t help but think, for always going where she isn’t wanted, laying her deathlike hands on things that aren’t hers. _I hope it hurts. I hope it breaks her. The shame of it. Maybe she’ll kill herself. I would._ She’s been told before that she’s unfeeling, by girlfriends, boyfriends, teachers, family, always because they’d wanted to provoke tears in her and couldn't. The truth, she knows, is that she feels much more deeply than most people. Her emotions are so _loud_ that those of others rarely reach her, unless they’re in pain, and then she hates them.

 _If she finds out I knew first, Christmas will be hellish_ , she thinks, and begins to plan how she’ll portray her sorrow and shock at the news when it comes. How much condescension she can she slip in alongside the tears? Could she, with the right solution of delicate reluctance, the tenderest maidenly sympathy, perhaps get away with breaking the news herself?

“I should tell her,” she says doubtfully, to test the waters.

Bonneville snorts, stubbing his cigarette out between the eyes of a plaster camel. “Mrs. Delamare? I’m certain she already knows. Let’s go in here,” he adds, lurching down a few steps into the propped-open door of a tiny bookseller’s shop.

Desperate to change the subject, Marisa trails after him as he browses the cluttered shelves, presumably bored with her and killing time. _This place is a tinderbox_ , she thinks, nearly tripping over an apple crate of disintegrating paperbacks. _If only he’d not put out his cigarette, then we might have had some excitement._ She imagines her skin melting, her hands growing fat with blisters.

“Are you a medical doctor?” she finally remembers to ask.

“No. Experimental theology.”

“Why, that’s exactly what I plan to study! I wish I’d known sooner. There’s so much I’d like to ask you.”

He throws her a skeptical look, then turns back to the shelf. “It’s a very demanding discipline,” he says blandly.

Marisa is accustomed to being dismissed in this way, and she presses on, wanting to prove herself. “Did you read about how they’re doing elastic scattering of charged particles using the Coulomb interaction? How it could be used to determine the composition of invisible materials?”

The hyena cackles.

Bonneville looks around furtively and now his eyes are on fire, and at first she thinks she’s gotten his attention at last, but instead of revealing to her those secrets of the universe which only experimental theologians know, he snatches a book off the shelf before him, seemingly at random. He examines it with an expression Marisa can only interpret as horror. He looks almost as if he’s going to cram it under his sweater and run when a rasping, tremulous voice interrupts him.

“Found something that interests you, young man?”

It seems to emanate from the teetering stack of codices that dominates the tiny shop counter. A painted turtle dæmon is perched at the top.

“Where did you get this?” Bonneville barks.

A frail hand emerges from behind the stacked books, eventually followed by an entire ancient bookseller, who with some effort takes the volume from Bonneville and looks it over. It must be several hundred years old, bound in pale calfskin, with a medallion stamped in gold on the cover. A dry tongue pokes out from between cracked lips to wet a palsied finger, and the fragile vellum pages begin to turn.

“Kircher’s _Egyptian Œdipus_ , volume three,” the bookseller mutters. “Strange! Where did you find it? I keep records of everything in the shop, but this I don't recognize. I certainly can’t imagine why I’d have put it in the stacks. It should be in the display case, it’s worth, oh, a few thousand in good condition, which it…” She trails off suddenly with a grunt.

“What? What?”

The bookseller grunts again, this one rising to an interrogative finish like a creaking cellar door. “Well, this here,” she says, laying the book open on the counter and beckoning Marisa and Bonneville to approach. The verso page bears a smudgy woodcut illustration of Harpocrates, a crowned child-god solemnly sucking his forefinger, with an owl dæmon at his side and a rooster in his arms.

The recto page is a crater.

It’s about the size of a fist, black around the edges, and penetrates almost to the back cover of the book, as if someone dropped a match there and left it to burn through. The monkey, perched on Marisa’s shoulders, grabs her hair next to the scalp with both his vicious little fists. “Most peculiar,” says the bookseller. “Difficult to find a buyer…”

The hyena is giggling loudly now, the hysterical glee of a madman. Bonneville kicks her. “I’ll give you a hundred for it,” he nearly shouts.

The bookseller’s dæmon draws his head into his shell, and she laboriously removes her half-moon reading glasses and folds her hands on the counter. She blinks up at Bonneville pleasantly.

“No use except as decoration, of course.”

“Yes, that’s what I want it for, decoration.”

“Some of the plates might be salvageable.”

“Surely not.”

“I ought to dispose of it, really.”

“Permit me, then.”

The bookseller smiles and opens her hands. “For five hundred I never even saw it.”

Bonneville’s fingers clench and his lip curls into a snarl, then he glances at Marisa and composes himself. He chokes out: “Two.”

“Four.”

“Three.”

“Done.”

The bookseller wraps the book in butcher’s paper and ties it with string, and Bonneville forks over some bills and tucks the nondescript package into his leather shoulder bag. “I think I'd like that coffee now,” he says casually, holding the door open for Marisa.

“What was that book?”

“Never mind. Walk with me, Miss Delamare,” he says firmly, pulling her by the elbow away from the bookseller’s as the owner begins to close up her shop.

“It’s van Zee, actually.”

“Van Zee? But I thought…”

“I told you, it’s rather complicated. You see my mother…”

“Oh, I see. She changed it when your father left her?”

This assumption, while not inaccurate, merits no response and receives none. She stares at him crossly, willing her face to go absolutely blank. He pauses, studying her.

“Yes, I thought so. That explains a lot."

"It does?"

"Mm." He places a hand on her shoulder and smiles with an unexpected warmth. "What is it about experimental theology that interests you, Miss van Zee?”

Marisa gropes for an answer that doesn’t sound maniacal. “I want to understand the universe, down to the smallest particle. I want to know exactly what makes it all tick,” she says at last. "What was that book you bought?"

"Can you keep a secret?"

"Of course."

"It belongs to another world. Here’s that café.”

“You’re teasing me.”

“Never. Well, sometimes. I’m dead serious about this.”

It’s after midnight now, too late for her to be drinking coffee, but Marisa would rather die than admit something so childish. Bonneville orders cappuccinos and selects an intimate table out of earshot of the other patrons.

“When you said another world you were being metaphorical, weren’t you?”

“Not at all. I'm surprised you're not acquainted with the theory. Every time you wave your arm”—taking her wrist, he demonstrates—“you touch dozens, perhaps millions of worlds. You cannot see them or feel them, for they occupy a different material plane than our own, and although these planes overlap, intertwine”—he laces his fingers through hers suddenly, laying their palms flat on the table—“they remain distinct.” The index finger of his other hand bumps across her outstretched fingers, tapping his own knuckles in between them. “Due to the limitations of your senses, you perceive only a fraction of the whole you’re woven into, and though you touch, you cannot feel, for nothing can pass through.”

Bonneville lifts their knitted hands and touches her palm thoughtfully with his thumb. “However, there are places, very rare, but they do exist, where the boundary between these worlds can be quite thin.” The nerves of her hand are sensitized now, and the light caress is making her scalp tingle. “With the proper technique, it can even be penetrated…” Here he presses the back of her hand to the table as if pinning her in arm-wrestling, and clutches it against his with strong fingers. The mound at the base of his thumb suddenly grinds into the hollow of her palm. She’s startled but tries not to let it show, staring at him wide-eyed as if uncertain of his meaning, and to her surprise, her discomfort once again seems to excite him. His eyes are lively, almost manic.

“Dr. Bonneville, I’m not sure I want to hear this sort of talk.” She primly disentangles her hand from his and lays it in her lap. He turns away from her, laughing, and takes a lazy sip of his cappuccino.

“Miss van Zee, we’re speaking now of experimental theology, nothing more. But I’m forgetting, you know so little about the subject.”

Marisa recognizes this remark as meant to humiliate her, and more humiliating still it hits home. The monkey puts his paw on her knee and she shoves him away, blushing. It’s not the slight against her scholarship so much as the condescension in his tone that stings, and yet something about the way Bonneville is watching her now, avid as a fisherman with a tug on the line, inspires her to play up her embarrassment. For some reason he wants to see her unsettled. What will he give her if he gets it? Letting the monkey crawl into her lap now, she sniffles as if fighting tears.

“You weren’t really talking about experimental theology, though, were you?” she says piously, eyes down.

“Oh, no? Then tell me, what was I talking about?”

She bites her lip, hoping she’s not laying it on too thick. “It’s just that, the way you spoke of touching, I almost thought… Well, never mind. You must think me very ignorant.”

“I think you inexperienced, that’s all. It’s not such a bad thing to be. But fortunately, when the pupil is eager to learn, it’s also easily remedied.”

Is he making her an offer? She raises her eyes to give him a questioning look. _Humbly, humbly,_ she reminds herself. _Make him think you can’t believe your luck._ “In my case it would take quite a patient teacher, I think.”

He surprises her again, this time by throwing her a look of the deepest contempt. “I don’t know who taught you that, but you do it very poorly.”

“Why—do what?”

“That. Was it that mother of yours? To simper and cringe like an empty-headed little coquette. It’s unbecoming. Anyone can see you’re unusually intelligent, and if anything probably more aware of it than is good for you. You think I need your flattery? Do you suppose me so inconsequential that I’d be threatened by a clever child? Don’t make me laugh. I was a clever child, too, you know. One recognizes one’s own.”

Shaken to the core, Marisa answers frankly. “Most men are more comfortable when a woman makes herself small.”

Bonneville snorts, leaning back in his chair. “Most men are fools.”

“I won’t say you’re wrong.” She drinks the last of her coffee in one long gulp, eager for the kickstart to her sluggish brain. He laughs.

“That’s more like it.”

He looks at her hands thoughtfully, and for a moment Marisa thinks he’s going to take them in his again, but he only mutters to his dæmon (“ _on y va, salope_ ") and prods her with his foot, not gently. The hyena struggles, grunting, to her feet.

“Well, it’s very late, Miss van Zee. I had better take you home.” He stands, hands in his pockets for his gloves, and his smile is charming, bright and feral. His teeth are a little crooked which gives him a rakish, troublemaking look that belies his shabby professor's clothes. She thinks he might keep surprising her, which boys her age so rarely do. More than anything she longs for that, for excitement, for novelty. Even an unpleasant surprise would be thrilling. He could surely give her that—she could make him want to.

“It’s Marisa,” she reminds him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _à la garçonne_ : boyishly loose, de-emphasizing the figure  
>  _Joyeux Noël_ : Merry Christmas  
>  _On y va, salope_ : "Time to go, slut"


	2. Marcel

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> “Strange to me, and how infinitely dreary, the serenity of innocence.” —Graham Greene, _The End of the Affair_

Marisa comes home wired thanks to the coffee and arcane discussion; she’s physically exhausted but too agitated to sleep. From the street they could see the lights had been extinguished in her mother’s apartment, so she had said goodnight to Bonneville at the door. “It looks like your friend Garnier went home without you,” she’d teased him.

A cryptic laugh broke open Bonneville’s lips against her cheek. “Yes, it does look that way. Well, goodnight, Marisa. I hope we meet again.”

“Goodnight, Gerard.”

Restless now, she scrubs her face and brushes her teeth ’til they bleed. In spite of herself she likes Bonneville, as much as she ever likes anybody, which is to say she finds him interesting, and she resents the anxiety this sentiment engenders over whether or not he likes her too. He called her a child—he’ll be sorry he said that. He finds her beautiful, but that isn’t enough. Those who praise her beauty tend to regard the fact of her intelligence as an inconvenient blemish, like a lazy eye, something less to be admired than accommodated. All her life, people have fallen in love with her face, claimed for their own enjoyment the one thing that’s hers alone. Sometimes she stares into the mirror and imagines setting her eyelashes on fire, razoring her nose off, melting her rosebud lips away with acid. No one yet has ever loved her for her mind.

Her mind is of course a shared territory, tainted by the presence of that other. All that malice and mutiny in her nature comes from him, she’s certain—if she could get away from him, even for a moment remind herself who is who, then maybe she would have a little peace. As soon as she’s thought of it he knows, and panics.

He grasps her hair tightly with his little fists. “Marisa, no,” he begs. His high, raspy voice cracking with dread. “Please, no. I can’t bear it.”

The words tear at her heart, but she has to do it, driven by something bigger than them both. She grabs him by the scruff of his neck and rips him from her back, tears away by the roots the fistfuls of her hair he’s clinging to, flings him into the closet and shuts the door and locks it. He sobs. He won’t scream or pound the walls and risk waking the house, but the tiny black fingers creep under the door like carpet beetles, imploring. “Please,” he hisses. “Tell me what I did. I’m sorry. Please.”

She walks out. The pain begins in earnest in the hall. She can’t hear his voice now but she can hear him in her mind: he sends her desperate images of them in each other’s arms at night, him wiping her tears after a fall, holding her hands through the agony of a tooth extraction. His hopelessness, his despair, his world dwindling to darkness without her. Her beauty in his eyes, his pride in her accomplishments. She hates that most of all. She takes another step away from him.

In the fury of battle a speared boar will charge the hunter, driving the blade through his own heart, goring himself out of bloodlust for his killer. She feels that, now; cold steel fills the core of her, she forces it deeper with every inch of separation. It’s exhilarating and it feels like dying. This loneliness is the center of all things, she knows with utter certainty—as the Sun holds the Earth in place and a cluster of suns holds the galaxy, the innumerable galaxies and every part of the universe revolve around a limitless, meaningless void of unknowing, unseeing, unfeeling. One day, she thinks, it will suck her down for good, but for now she’s only desperate to get closer: to get a fleeting glimpse of the awful truth of existence.

She’s on hands and knees now, without knowing how she got there. She must look ridiculous, crawling like a baby or a beast, but if she can think of how she looks she’s not yet gone far enough. If he’s not there, there’s no one to observe her—he’s in the dark, plastered to the door, chewing on his hands to keep from screaming, shivering from the pain that racks his small body—pain she chose for herself, for them, for him, and it means nothing. Her lungs are ice, her stomach filled with razors. She makes herself stand and when she falls she falls forwards into the parlor and the pain is all she knows and nothing matters, nothing at all. She’s forgotten her name. Nothing exists. Her vision has grown dim. She waits for death.

It doesn’t come.

 _Marisa, come back, I love you_ , he’s pleading, and she rolls to her side and inches like a worm back the way she came. She’s seen enough. Her body is like a safe blown open by the lack of him, her arms and breast are nothing but holes in his shape. As soon as she gets some air in her lungs she stands and sprints to the closet, springs the lock and crushes her dæmon to her throat, shucks off her dress and lays on top of him on the bedroom rug in nothing but her drawers and stockings, retching; the weight of her body holds him as secure as the lid of a tomb, and he bites her and bites her and when he finds a spot he likes his jaws clamp in her skin and stay there.

“My darling, my darling, my little love, it’s done, it’s over now,” she gasps. There’s no need to explain the swell of satisfaction that rushes in as horror recedes. He feels it too. They feel whole, washed clean.

Once the nausea subsides she wipes her tears and the blood on her breast with a handkerchief, finds a camisole to sleep in, drinks a little water, and puts out the light. All the while the monkey dangles heavily with his arms about her neck like an annoying baby brother, and his weight is as much pleasure as his absence was pain.

A soft breeze sweeps over her face in the darkness and wakes her. A snowy owl dæmon is alighting on the headboard, rolling her head curiously from side to side. Marisa hears her bedroom door being carefully shut, and a moment later a lithe little shape slips in under her covers.

His thistly hair smells babyish from sleep, like warm popcorn and orange blossom soap. He’s clad in baggy cotton flannel pajamas and his body is sleek as a minnow against her chest. She spoons him, tucking the top of his head under her chin. “Did you have a bad dream?” she whispers.

“Yes, but I don’t want to talk about it.” Marcel reaches up to stroke his dæmon’s feathered breast for comfort. “Why were you out so late?”

“Maman had company.”

Marcel shudders. “I didn’t like them.”

“Which one? The art dealer or the scientist?”

“I don’t know. Both.”

“They were fine. You just got bored of listening to grown-up talk.”

No doubt thinking she’s too old to understand, he sighs and rubs his stuffy nose against the pillow before snuggling deeper into her arms. He says nothing for several minutes. Just when she thinks he’s dropped off to sleep, he whispers, “That man with the hyena dæmon. I’ve seen him before.”

“Oh, hmm, where,” Marisa mumbles, the words slurred to convey her disinterest.

“Here,” Marcel says very clearly. _Ici_. Marisa is brought up short.

“At Maman’s?”

“Uh huh.”

“That’s strange. He made it clear they’re not friends.”

“Then you talked to him?”

“Yes, he’s very amusing. We went for a walk together. He’s going to help me with my studies too.”

Another long silence before he says: “Maman wasn’t home.”

“You were home alone?”

“Geneviève was watching me. She let him in.”

For a moment Marisa hates the man, resolves never to speak to him again, thanks her lucky stars she never developed genuine feelings for him. Then she remembers the name of that emotion is jealousy and pushes it out of her mind. Bonneville must be friends with lots of people, even other girls like her.

“Maybe he was helping her study or something,” she suggests, to her shame, hopefully.

“No, because I saw them in the parlor together. Doing something bad.”

“What something bad? Smoking, playing dice?”

Marcel sighs heavily, torn between irritation at being teased and the urgency of completing his narrative. “She, um. She had her skirt off, and he was… kissing her. You know.”

Marisa can’t quite bring herself to laugh, but she snorts.

“I don’t think you should be friends with him,” Marcel continues, gaining momentum. “What if he’s some kind of pervert?”

“You’re the pervert if you just stood there and watched them.”

“I didn’t. I got up for a drink of water and then I went back to bed. I couldn’t help seeing them but I wasn’t _watching_. But you’d better be careful. Don’t be alone with him. What if he tries to do that to you?”

“So what if he does? Why do you care so much what grown-up people do? Just because you’re too little to understand it doesn’t mean that what they did was bad. You’re lucky they didn’t see you.”

“His dæmon saw me. That hyena.”

“She… she did?”

“I saw her eyes glowing in the dark. She didn’t do anything. Just stared at me with her mouth hanging open, you know. Drooling.”

“She probably didn’t want to ruin the mood.”

“That’s gross, Marisa.”

“Why are you such a goody two-shoes? Maybe you could get a job in the Magisterium, peeping in people’s beds at night and making sure they’re behaving themselves.”

“Maybe I will,” he says huskily. She folds her arms around him protectively and kisses the top of his head.

“Go to sleep.”

He sighs, but the weight of the secret is off his chest now. He can relax. “ _You_ go to sleep then,” he grumbles with affection, and they do.

The first rose-red fingers of dawn are poking through the curtains when she feels Marcel slipping from her arms. He’s a conscientious child, trying his best not to disturb her, still young enough to wake with the sun, and old enough to entertain himself in the early-morning hours. She watches him sleepily, half dreaming, as he slowly slides first one leg and then the other to the floor and stuffs his feet into his fleece slippers. Some adult teeth have grown in, lengthening his stern little face. For a moment she thinks she can see what he’ll look like as a man. He raises his arm for his dæmon to land on, and she swoops to him, too large for him almost, forcing him to counterbalance. She’s blinking her sensitive owl’s eyes, dazzled by the sunlight.

“Does Clothilde always take that form?” Marisa asks him, drowsy.

Marcel starts. “Yes,” he admits, again stroking the owl’s soft breast. “She settled a couple of months ago. She’s pretty, isn’t she?”

Something inside her cracks and a gout of frustration under pressure floods her head. Parts of her consciousness are still dreaming and the emotions stretch preposterously tall as evening shadows, erupting unfettered as spite. “You’re too old to get into bed with me,” she informs him coldly. “You’re not a baby anymore, you’re almost a man. It’s obscene. For someone so preoccupied with decency, I’m surprised that didn’t occur to you.”

“Maman lets me.”

She raises her eyebrows.

“I don’t know,” he says uneasily. “I didn’t think about it like that.”

“Perhaps you lack the capacity. Perhaps there’s some perversion in your soul.”

The bold man-child look is gone now: Marcel’s eyes are wide, his chin puckered and lower lip protruding. He doesn’t dare contradict her because he has no way of knowing whether what she said is true. The owl clicks her tongue irritably at Marisa but the monkey has risen from the pillow and prowls towards her, slow and menacing. She turns away then, head nearly backwards, and contents herself with grooming the boy, tugging at strands of his matted hair with her hooked beak.

He’s careful not to slam the door when he flees. Pleased with herself, Marisa rolls into his warm vacancy, the monkey’s tail secure under her chin, but before they can drift off a muffled commotion transpires in the hall. She hears Marcel’s reedy apology, followed by the low bluster of a gentleman in a state of embarrassment, and she and her dæmon stare into each other’s faces without seeing, each trying to place him first. “Garnier,” she realizes aloud, and they hear the front door closing.

“Can _no one_ in this household bear to spend the night alone?” complains the monkey, mock-despairing.

“We shall have to set a precedent.”

“Or else adapt to local custom.”

“All right, if you insist,” Marisa smiles. “Tomorrow night Marcel will sleep in Maman’s bed, and Garnier can sleep with me.”

“You’re incorrigible.”

“You love me.”

“I do, in fact… I don’t suppose any dæmon has ever loved a woman more.”

“That doesn’t change a thing, you know.”

He pauses long enough to make her nervous. “You can’t blame me for trying,” he finally deadpans. His whole body moves with her indifferent shrug. She mumbles something vague, already gone.

In the following weeks they trace the steps of an old, familiar dance. Marisa allows Maman to make a pet of her, as she did when she was little: it’s the only way they can tolerate each other’s company. They go to the salon together, get their matching golden hair highlighted and waved; “This must be your younger sister, Mme. Delamare, you couldn’t possibly have a daughter so grown-up,” jokes the hairdresser, and Marisa giggles prettily. They buy beautiful new dresses in the latest styles, each advising the other on which flatters her best, and as she arranges for delivery Maman brags to the shop clerks about her daughter’s unparalleled eye. All the while Marcel tags along uncomplaining, his nose in a book unless he’s directly addressed.

They dine at fashionable cafés and restaurants where there are tacit competitions to see who can eat the least pastry or meat, or the most minuscule portions of rich jewel-like delicacies, and Maman fills her in on the gossip she missed while she was abroad, appealing to Marcel when some essential detail escapes her. Marisa repays them with fabulously embellished tales of Oxford intrigue: a student pregnant by a married professor whose wife shot herself when she found out; a Gyptian doctoral candidate arrested for racketeering in the middle of his thesis defense. She has local news as well: she’s heard a thing or two about the low moral character of the neighbor girl, Geneviève. Maman agrees it would be best not to associate with her, while Marcel stares daggers at them across the table, but says nothing.

And there are Christmas gifts to shop for, with the three of them making a game of ever-shifting alliances, where one distracts another so the third can sneak off for some secret prize, until the entire family is drunk on extravagance, sore-footed and absolutely radiant with holiday spirit.

It’s all palpably false, but a lie beautiful enough to live in.


	3. Gerard

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> myself i would rather have  
> half the happiness and twice  
> the longevity
> 
> but at the same time i wish  
> there was something i wanted  
> as badly as he wanted to fry himself
> 
> —Don Marquis, “The Lesson of the Moth”

In the days after Christmas the Delamares dine on leftovers scavenged at odd hours, because their servants have been given the time off. They change out of their pajamas only briefly to model their new clothes, they spend luxurious hours sprawled in bed with their new books, they rarely speak to each other except to read aloud from an interesting passage, or to offer a bit of chocolatl in exchange for a marchpane.

Marisa’s favorite gift is a bottle of perfume, the first in her life that’s all her own and not one Maman grew tired of. Out of the box it had smelled rank and sour, but on her skin it blooms into something remarkable: an exhilarated rush of white flowers, elegant lily melting to sultry neroli and jasmine, with the subtle base of salty animal notes providing an almost imperceptible undercurrent of menace. Even Maman seems a little disturbed by the effect. Marisa wears it every day.

On the fourth evening of Christmastide, a light snow is falling and Maman and Marcel are inexpertly arranging logs in the fireplace. The telephone rings and Marisa drags herself off the couch to answer it. “Delamare residence.”

“Miss Delamare?” the doorman asks.

“Speaking.”

“There’s a gentleman on the line for you, a Dr. Bonneville.”

“That’s fine, put him through.” A series of clicks and pops follows, and then finally a man’s voice crackles through the receiver.

“Hello? Marisa?” he’s saying.

“Gerard, hello,” she purrs, unable to conceal her pleasure. “I hope you had an enjoyable Christmas.”

“Certainly, though I’m not sure I consider the birth of Christ much of anything worth celebrating. Anyway, listen: I’m going to be by your building in about thirty minutes, and I want you to come and get a drink with me.”

There are many reasons why she ought not to do this, but one or two very compelling ones she should. Of course he’s rather handsome and rather brilliant, and he might take an interest in her career, and that’s all very exciting. But beyond that, she’s beginning to feel cooped up and sweaty in her pajamas and dirty hair, and just the prospect of leaving the apartment, of a conversation with someone new, fills her with sudden, unexpected longing.

“I have to ask my mother,” she says, and he chuckles, which might be pleasure or derision. “Maman, it’s that friend of yours, Dr. Bonneville. He wants to take me for coffee again this evening, is that all right?” It’s quite all right with Maman.

“ _Coffee?_ ” Bonneville teases when she gets back on the line.

“I’m sorry, I was under the impression people drank that.”  
  
“Be ready at nine,” he replies, and rings off.

Marisa has been at pubs before with groups of friends, cheery raucous places where people go to celebrate. The establishment Bonneville takes her to is nothing like that. The naphtha lamps here all have red-glass shades, and instead of pennants and memorabilia the walls are frescoed with elaborate foliage, or dotted with framed etchings plainly razored from ancient books. Nobody sings boisterous drinking songs, because in another room a nocturne is being played on a piano. In the dimly-lit booth there are no menus: at Bonneville’s request a desultory server of indeterminate gender brings dark fizzy beer in curvaceous glasses. The server’s dæmon is an extraordinarily beautiful iridescent beetle, which clings to their breast as still as a brooch, but it stretches its wings with a clicking sound as they place the drinks on the table.

“Athanasius Kircher,” Bonneville says suddenly, “was a Jesuit scholar of the seventeenth century, and a polymath of some renown. He wrote treatises on many subjects, including magnetism, microscopy, geology—he was highly attuned to the world of invisible things, to the qualities of unseen actors which may be determined by observing their measurable effects.”

“This is the man who wrote that book you bought,” Marisa guesses.

“The _Œdipus Ægyptiacus_ ,” Bonneville confirms.

“Which in Roman means what? The Œdipus of Egypt?”

“More or less. Are you familiar with the legend of Œdipus?”

She takes a drink. The beer is sweet and light, unexpectedly complex, with an aftertaste of cherry. “He murdered his father and fucked his mother,” she says slyly. “Then he gouged out his own eyes.”

“You would gravitate to the salacious bits. No, I’m referring to his encounter with the sphinx.”

“Oh! He solved her riddle. ‘What creature walks on four legs at dawn’ and so forth.”

“Kircher thought he had solved a great riddle as well. He believed that through deductive reasoning, he had discovered the true meaning behind the picture-writing of Ancient Egypt, a language which by that point had already been extinct for a millennium. He published a book about his discovery. It caused something of a sensation. He was hailed as a master code-breaker.”

“You make it sound as though he didn’t deserve the praise.”

“He didn’t. His conclusions were entirely incorrect.”

“Then what did you want his book so badly for?”

“I’ve already told you.”

“‘It comes from another world,’” she quotes. He raises his eyebrows affirmatively. “Very well, let’s suppose that’s literally true. There are other worlds, different from ours in some ineffable way that allows them to occupy the same physical space, isn’t that the theory? And yet so similar to ours that the exact same book exists in both, and near enough that somehow it slipped from one to the other—I’m sure you realize this all sounds like rubbish.”

“How innocent you sound.” This remark is ingeniously constructed to leave her no response that will not appear to confirm it, so to spite him she holds her tongue. He shakes his head with a hollow laugh and gets out his pouch of smokeleaf. If this is flirtation it’s a lot more subtle than she’s used to. His dark eyes flick to her face and then back to the half-formed cigarette between his hands. He shrugs. “You’re not particularly close to your dæmon, are you?”

“What makes you say that?” The monkey, who’s been picking flecks of paint from the wallpaper with his little nails, leans anxiously against Marisa’s hip, and she puts an arm around him.

“It’s just a feeling I get,” Bonneville continues, sealing the cigarette with the tip of his tongue. This time he does not offer it to her. He picks a stray bit of smokeleaf from his lip. “Another thing you and I have in common. Can you separate from him?”

“Certainly not!”

“A pity. It would have been useful.”

He lights the cigarette from the votive candle on the table between them. Looking pensive, he takes a long drag and then stares deep into her eyes, considering her. He has that urgent, fragile look men get just before they say something foolish. A look like a dog begging at the dinner table. _Oh, no,_ she thinks desperately. _He’s about to tell me he’s in love with me. He’s going to ruin everything. Oh, and we were doing so well._

“Marisa, I have to be frank with you,” he says and cigarette smoke unfurls like forbidden words made manifest.

“Don’t,” she says. He ignores her.

“A woman as perceptive as yourself would have figured it out soon enough, but I’m afraid there is no time to waste. I won’t insult you with obfuscation. I brought you here because there’s something we need to discuss.”

“I wish you wouldn’t…”

“My research. I want you to help me with it.”

This is so unexpected that once again all she can do is stare. The server returns to collect the empty glasses, and Bonneville gestures for two more. Under the table his hyena dæmon is panting heavily, working up to her hysterical cackle. Suddenly he slams his open hand down on the tabletop, rattling the ashtray and making Marisa jump.

“I think I’d like to know what kind of research first,” she blurts out.

“I expected nothing less. There’s an experiment I’m running, and it needs an extra set of hands. The trouble is, I can’t ask any of my usual lab assistants at the university because it’s to do with the Rusakov field. Do you understand? I can’t even do it at the chapel there, I’ve obtained a private laboratory for this work. Anyone known to be involved with it risks charges of heresy—you know what happened to Rusakov himself, I assume.”

“Tortured, exorcised, excommunicated,” she recites, and the words are delicious and red-hot on her tongue.

“That doesn’t frighten you?”

Marisa shakes her head, and Bonneville smiles at her with great warmth and admiration. “You’ve seen the book, you’re the only one who has,” he continues. “That means you’re already complicit. And in a way you’re an ideal co-conspirator. You’re intelligent enough to understand the work, but few people would suspect someone so young and pretty to be connected with something so illicit. Your youth also means that, if the worst should happen, you’ll face a much less severe punishment than an adult would. And of course, in two weeks, you’ll no longer be in Paris. As long as you keep your mouth shut it’s rather the perfect crime. It’s a shame about your dæmon, though.”

“Why is that?”

“It probably won’t matter, but if you were able to separate from him a bit that would simplify certain aspects of the experiment, that’s all.”

“Oh, well, that changes things. I thought you were only asking to be impudent.”

“You can, then? How far?”

“Twenty, thirty yards.”

In polite society such an admission would be met with disgust and embarrassment. At best this ability of hers might be considered a grotesque party trick; at worst a sure sign of derangement. But Bonneville looks at her as if she’s said she can walk on water.

“Wonderful. That’s wonderful. Is there anything you don’t do?”

“Hmmm. I don’t smoke.”

With raised eyebrows, and the hint of a mischievous smile, he offers her the cigarette in his hand. She accepts with haughty courtesy and takes a little drag.

“Oh, no, no, not like that. Try again.” Marisa rolls her eyes but sucks up a little more smoke, and as she does so Bonneville half-rises from the table, staring over her shoulder.

“Mme. Delamare!” he exclaims. “What are you doing here!”

Marisa inhales sharply, and for the first time smoke fills her lungs like a fist. She coughs, choking, and Bonneville sits and begins to laugh. Again the hyena is panting heavily. Crossly, still struggling for breath, Marisa looks behind her, and of course there’s no one there, and though she’s infuriated to be made a fool of the smoke comes out of her in a little shuddering giggle that soon becomes a full-throated laugh.

“Bastard!” she gasps.

Entirely unrepentant, he nods, taking the cigarette back. “But now you understand.” And she does.

As they’re leaving, Bonneville lifts his hand as if to lay it on her shoulder, but then seems to think better of it, reaching into his pocket instead as he looks away. “Incidentally, I’m sorry to ask you this, but when you join me in the lab you’ll need to wear something less… fashionable.” He looks her over critically, but this time she doesn’t blush.

“Of course I wouldn’t wear an evening dress to work in.”

“It isn’t just that. You see, the owner of the building and I have what you might call an arrangement… If he saw me bringing a pretty young woman around the place he might get the wrong idea.”

“What makes you think I’m his type?”

“Oh, you’re not at all. I am. That’s why he lets me use the space. And he does tend to be rather jealous—all the more reason for us to exercise discretion.”

“Isn’t that inconvenient, mixing business and pleasure? Why don’t you just rent a space so you can do as you like?”

“Even if I could afford it, it’s better not to leave a paper trail.”

This strikes Marisa as eminently reasonable. With work that could be so easily misconstrued by smaller minds, strict adherence to protocol is nothing but a liability. Official channels threaten interference, impenetrable bureaucracy, unpleasant consequences, whereas alliances of affection can be endlessly renegotiated. And the easy way Bonneville takes her into his confidence, his nonchalant assumption of mutual sympathy, flatters her so much that she barely notices the sting of his rejection. But the education she’s receiving is better than she could have dreamed of.

At home she finds Marcel up past his bedtime, reading in the armchair with his dæmon perched on the back, a blanket thrown over his lap, looking for all the world like a tiny black-haired grandfather. She wonders if he’ll sit hunched and alone in this cluttered apartment, cobwebs growing all around him, with his nose in a book until he dies.

“Did Maman go to bed already?”

“She’s out with that Garnier.”

“You’re home alone? I guess Geneviève couldn’t come. Too bad,” she says sweetly as she hangs up her coat. Marcel scowls but he doesn’t take the bait. He drops his book on the chair and Clothilde hops to his shoulder.

“Maman said I’m big enough to look after myself.”

“She says a lot of things.”

She starts for the hall but he moves to block her path. “You were with the scientist.”

“You mean Gerard? As a matter of fact, I was.”

“How could you? After I warned you about him?”

“It was all perfectly professional, and honestly, Marcel, your preoccupation with him is a little concerning. You’re behaving like a jealous lover.”

He’s blushing furiously now. “I’m not! I’m trying to protect you, that’s all! I’m the man of the house now, and—“

“Oh, is that what Maman tells you when you crawl into bed with her?”

His little chin juts out. “She _doesn’t_ —You don’t have to make everything so tawdry! All you think about is sex! I’ll tell you what I think, I think you’re as sick as he is! I bet you _want_ him to—”

Marisa never finds out just what it is she wants Bonneville to do, because the monkey hurls himself from his perch on a side table and tackles Marcel’s dæmon with all his might. Clothilde scrabbles for Marcel’s shoulder with clumsy talons, and the boy wails helplessly as his dæmon is wrestled to the floor.

“You don’t know what you’re talking about!” Marisa cries, ashamed of the hurt in her voice but unable to control it. The monkey has the owl’s legs clamped tight in one black paw, and with his wicked little hands he outstretches her huge wing. A pinion feather cracks between his fingers. Clothilde screams. “Don’t fool yourself into thinking you’re grown up just because your dæmon settled, there’s a lot more to it than that! There are plenty of things about men and women you can’t learn from a book. And for your information, Gerard is a homosexual. I don’t suppose you know what that means.”

“Of course I do—”

“I see! Well perhaps it’s something you two have in common. Shall I let him know you’re interested? No?”

His temper is abating now: the force of her anger has frightened him out of his own. He stares at her coldly with tears in his eyes, clutching the ripped shoulder of his dressing gown where the blood is seeping through. The monkey lets go of Marcel’s dæmon suddenly, and saunters towards their bedroom, utterly calm. Marisa shoves Marcel out of the way and follows. Clothilde, her white feathers stained with red, desperate to return to the warmth of Marcel’s shoulder, struggles to get aloft on her mutilated wing.

Two days later Bonneville brings Marisa to an industrial area far from the center of town. It’s oddly silent, the unplowed streets choked with pristine snow, and no smoke comes from the smokestacks. Not a single factory is operating now. It’s noon, the first day of the new year.

He advises her to walk in his footsteps. No one must know she’s here. Bonneville is furtive as he cracks open the stiff iron door, and he guides her inside before him with a firm hand on her back. It smells like a warehouse, sawdust and damp concrete, and yellow newspaper covers the high windows. Before her eyes can adjust, he’s locked the door behind them.

The hyena is giggling, running in tight little circles. Bonneville moves her aside with his foot to pull the chain on a dim anbaric bulb. “It’s downstairs,” he says. “This way.”

The laboratory is not merely down narrow stairs but past a long arched corridor, lined with low wooden doors on either side that clearly haven’t been opened in years. “This looks like some kind of prison,” Marisa observes.

“It does, doesn’t it? I think Garnier uses these for storage.”

“Garnier?”

“My patron. Not Bertrand. His brother, François. Here we are.”

The interior walls and floor in this part of the basement are crumbling, and they form an irregular slope on one side into an underground river a storey below. Bonneville leads her across an iron catwalk and through a glass door into a room newly-built on the ragged precipice opposite. The clicking of the hyena’s nails on the the concrete suddenly deadens when she scampers inside. Marisa hugs her dæmon close, unable to take her eyes off the black slow-moving water past the grating underfoot.

Just as she enters the lab, the lights stutter on. The floor is a patchwork of mismatched cauchuc mats, the _Œdipus Ægyptiacus_ lies open under a glass dome on a desk, and one corner is dominated by a hulking copper boiler attached to a machine like a cast-iron pipe organ that might be a steam-powered anbaric generator. Extending from this, black cauchuc-wrapped wires are draped like evil vines around the rafters, where they connect to a dull gray mesh chamber on one end of the room, and on the other to a control bank insulated by a Faraday cage. In the center of the floor hulks a massive frame housing two squat metal cylinders, one stacked on the other, with an large glass pipe protruding from one side. This pipe points towards the far wall where sheets of some aluminum-like metal are tacked. In the centermost panel is a charred spot.

“Gerard… what is all this?” Marisa asks, throwing her coat over a chair on top of Bonneville’s. He’s already donned protective goggles and an apron, and he’s scraping a few flakes of burned paper from the book into a test tube, which he caps and then fits into the cylindrical machine. Then he gets on hands and knees with a wrench to open the valve of the gas canister that powers the boiler. His shirtsleeves are rolled up showing muscular forearms, dusted with fine black hair. Veins stand out on the backs of his large hands. She shivers.

“The human-dæmon bond attracts the flow of Rusakov particles, which are amplified by the cyclotron, and that flow is interrupted by the panel. The particles have nowhere to go, an enormous pressure builds, and they’re forced to tear through! And just like that, there’s another world,” he says as he gets to his feet, shouting a little to be heard over the low drone of the generator, “—the world of the book! It lies just beyond this wall!”

“Is he _mad_?” the monkey whispers to her anxiously.

“No, he’s a genius,” she tells him. He responds with a soft hiss. Bonneville, in the Faraday cage now, sweeps his hand up the panel to activate an entire row of switches with one swoop, and the cylinder contraption in the center of the room begins to hum. He’s pointing excitedly at the charred spot on the wall.

“There! Right there! That’s where you’ll pass through!”

“Where _I_ —?”

“Yes, you, Marisa! You’re the only one who can!” He runs to her and grabs her by the shoulders. His brown eyes show the whites on every side. “It’s perfectly safe, you’ll see.”

“Then why don’t you go yourself?”

“For two reasons. Hold this,” he says, handing her a metal bar the size of a pencil, from which a copper wire extends. “First, the window is quite unstable—if it dissolves meet me back here at four sharp, do you understand? And I’ll open it again—someone needs to stay behind to operate the device, and you don’t know how. And second… one moment…”

The hyena is whining now, cringing away from him, squirming agitatedly. Bonneville grabs her around the scruff of the neck, standing over her with his legs around her ribs, and above the mechanical hum that fills the room Marisa can hear her crying, “ _Je t’en prie, je t’en prie, je_ —" and then her voice goes quiet as he fastens a leather muzzle around her ugly face. She wheezes, panicked, and he wrestles her into the mesh chamber. Her head protrudes from a hole in the top. Then he takes the metal bar from Marisa’s hands and forces it between his dæmon’s clenched teeth. Now the hyena can do nothing but tremble.

The monkey is transfixed. “What is he doing to her?” he murmurs. His arms around Marisa’s neck are too tight. She shakes her head.

“And second…?” Marisa shouts.

“And second,” Bonneville continues, coming back to her and taking her hands in his, “the people out there”—he points at the charred spot again—“they’re freaks, they don’t have dæmons. I don’t know how, but they don’t. If they see one we’ll be found out at once! And _she_ can’t hide”—he glances with loathing at the immobilized hyena—“but _he_ can. Now stand over there. And when the window opens, you must go through immediately, do you understand? Say you understand.”

“I understand. But what do you want me to do there?”

“Steal something! You must steal something manmade.”

“Steal something? What for?”

“For the resonating chamber, of course!” he says unclearly. “Get into position!”

The air feels charged with anbaricity; her skin prickles, the monkey’s hair stands on end. Bonneville dances away from them now and climbs back into the Faraday cage, making minute adjustments to the dials on the control panel and lifting his goggles to squint at the results on the corresponding meters. The cyclotron emits a deep rhythmic buzz like a giant bullroarer. As Marisa picks her way across the uneven floor, past the whimpering hyena and the powerful machines and the screaming madman, he instructs her: “Don’t be afraid! It’s perfectly safe! Four o’clock, remember!”

“Four o’clock!” she confirms, touching her watch to be sure. Bonneville is unbuckling his belt. Startled, Marisa stares at him as he folds it double, and again, and wedges it between his teeth. Then he opens the door of the Faraday cage, takes a deep breath through his forced grin, looks the cyclotron up and down, and grasps a metal bar, from which a thin copper wire protrudes.

The room goes dark, the anbaric cacophony is suddenly silent, and she can only hear the hyena’s panting, and then Bonneville’s muffled scream. The hyena is screaming too. The machines come back on with a sizzling sound. A lightbulb pops with a shower of sparks and goes out. An anbaric arc shoots from the cyclotron’s glass tube to the charred spot on the aluminum panel. The aluminum shivers like a struck cymbal, and the spot becomes a different basement, a different catwalk, a different underground river.

Marisa feels more exhilarated than ever before in her life. Anything could happen now—absolutely anything at all.

“Now! Now! Now!” Bonneville is screaming through his teeth.

With ravenous curiosity scalding her every nerve, Marisa approaches the window. The anbaric arc has been replaced by a beam of golden light. Her monkey dæmon is perched securely on her shoulders. Her heart is bursting with joy. She steps through.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _Je t’en prie_ : please, I beg you


	4. Garnier

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> “The best way to overcome fear of fire is to be BURNED TO DEATH!” —Maakies, Tony Millionaire

The first thing she notices is the smell. The basement Marisa has stepped into has the same damp-concrete-and-iron ambience as the one she just left, but there’s overtones of soot now, and the distinctive tang of coal spirit. It looks the same, but curiously, this other building is warmer.

This basement has no new-built laboratory room: the window she came through hangs in midair, a gouge in an invisible wall. Bonneville’s dark lab can still be seen through the hole, flashing erratically with anbaric sparks. She circles it. From the side, and from behind, it all but disappears.

She crosses the underground river with careful steps, because the catwalk in this world might not be as sturdy as her own, though in fact it seems newer: instead of dull and rust-flecked the iron here is oily black. The floor that had been crumbling in steep cliffs down to the water is mostly intact here, too. She listens for signs of habitation. A persistent thump-thump like a heartbeat emanates from the floor overhead, but other than that the basement is silent as a tomb.

Like Orpheus, she looks back. The window on the opposite bank is blinking now, as if sparking with an anbaricity of its own. Then it blinks out entirely. It doesn’t return.

“Shit,” her dæmon hisses.

“He warned us this might happen,” Marisa reminds him. It’s too exciting for her to be upset. “We just have to make sure we’re here at four o’clock, and he’ll open it again, remember? It must be almost one now,” she adds, and checks her wrist.

Her watch has stopped.

“Don’t panic,” she snaps before the monkey can react. “First things first. Let’s find a clock.” Using this decisive tone gives her confidence, so she keeps talking. “Whatever’s making that noise upstairs, someone up there is bound to know the time.”

“You can’t go among people looking like that.” The monkey hops lightly to the railing to straighten her clothes, his anxiety evident in the unusually rough way he handles her. “Hold still,” he grumbles, tugging his fingers impatiently through her hair. She swats him, a reflex, and he drops her hair comb with a clatter.

“Idiot!” she cries, but he’s already scurrying after it, down the embankment and out of sight.

“Marisa? There’s something here you should see.” His high harsh voice sounds curiously distant.

“Where are you?”

“Come down.”

She descends a ladder mounted beneath the catwalk, which ends at a narrow ledge a couple of feet above the murky water. In the faint light she can see oily rainbows crawling on the sluggish river’s surface. Following the sound of his voice, she finds her dæmon crouched in a broad drainage pipe, with the silver comb clutched in his wet hands.

“What’s wrong?” she calls in to him, and he winces, shushing her as the noise bounces off the concrete. Once her eyes begin to adjust she sees the inside of this pipe is scarred with char-marks.

“Look,” he whispers, pointing. One of the marks is a deeper black than the others, and light plays across it as if reflected off the water. But the light isn’t on that mark, it’s _in_ it. The mark is another window, more stable than the one they came through. She crawls inside the pipe and peeks through, and catches a glimpse of some different oily river.

“Where does it lead?”

“This goes to our world, I think, but there are are others down here I haven’t looked in. Did Bonneville make them? Does he even know about them?”

Marisa shakes her head. “If he did, he’d be using them, wouldn’t he? You can’t see it from above, and with his dæmon he couldn’t easily climb down. I expect he hasn’t any idea.” The monkey returns to her arms, carefully skirting the trickle of drain water.

“I feel better knowing we can get back without his help,” he remarks. Clinging to her back, he dexterously replaces the comb as she climbs.

“You worry too much.”

“One of us has to.”

“Very well, _you_ worry, and I’ll see to it that things actually get done.”

Bonneville never did tell them what to expect in this other world, but they find it nearly identical to their own, with the differences so minor as to appear almost shockingly mundane. The fixtures all look fresher and the newspaper on the windows upstairs is white. It must be New Year’s Day here as well, for although the building is still outfitted as a warehouse on the lower floors, and she finds the trappings of a bindery above, there’s not a soul in evidence except a lone man in denim coveralls, operating a mechanical printing press. Marisa stares at him for a long time, fascinated: as promised, the man has no dæmon. Nonetheless he seems intelligent, alert, even happy in his skillful occupation. Clutching the monkey for comfort as she observes this uncanny being, her imagination supplies his invisible companion—perhaps a tailor-bird, deftly picking up dropped paper scraps and swooping to dodge the flying iron platens.

The press is loud enough to cover the sound of her footsteps, but she moves cautiously to avoid attracting the man’s attention with her movement. As much as she longs to speak to him she can’t ask him for the time as she’d planned, for her presence will be suspicious in the otherwise unoccupied factory. Instead she climbs the next flight of stairs, where there are offices.

Everything in these rooms looks as though it will be missed. There are heavy fountain pens and crystal ink bottles, massive account-books bound in oxblood leather with gilt or marbled edges, and dull-looking industrial books in inconveniently sequential volumes. She flips through these without much hope, but all she learns is that the technology of this world lags pitifully behind her own. If Bonneville hoped to discover a more advanced society beyond his laboratory wall he’s going to be sorely disappointed. A distant buzz of clockwork breaks her concentration. Hurriedly, Marisa replaces the book while the monkey dashes off to find the source of the noise. There’s a conference room at the end of the hall, and from within it a grandfather clock is striking four.

He leaps to her and as she catches him she’s already running, they hurtle down the stairs together like an avalanche, and Marisa trusts the printing press’s din to hide her thundering footfalls. “Something manmade!” her dæmon reminds her as she skids around the sharp turn from the press room to the paper-windowed warehouse. A sturdy cabinet is just within reach, and she yanks out one of its drawers with all her might. It falls to the floor with an enormous crash, dropping hundreds of tiny metal pieces like matchsticks on the concrete. She scoops a handful of these into her pocket and flies down the basement stairs, through the prison-like hallway, and across the catwalk.

The window is back, flickering ominously.

Clutching the monkey to her chest, Marisa hurls herself through. She takes the brunt of the fall with her shoulder on one of the scattered cauchuc mats. In the sparking darkness her eyes can’t adjust, and she feels more than sees Bonneville’s strong hands helping her to her feet. Once she’s up she clings to him, resting her hands on those muscular forearms for balance while he grasps her shoulders in his hands and he stares at her raptly with his tawny madman’s eyes, and she laughs breathlessly along with him.

“You’re back. You’re back. What did you bring me?” he asks. She fumbles in her pocket and hands him the matchsticks. “Lead type. Did you find these in the building? The other building, I mean?” She nods, and he tucks them into his pocket.

Then he kisses her.

One arm fits snugly at the narrowest part of her waist and the other crosses up her back so the fingertips graze her nape, and his lips are on hers before she knows what’s happening. Delicately, but authoritatively, he parts her lips with his tongue, and by instinct she opens her mouth and touches her tongue to his. He tastes of cloves and dental work. Of course it feels strange—Aren’t they friends? Aren’t they colleagues?—but nothing can be more strange than what’s already happened to her today, and her blood is up and he embraces her so passionately that she can’t help thinking this must be the right thing to do. Of course she’s been kissed many times, and more, but with Gerard it’s different: she doesn’t need to show him how. As he reaches up to cup her face in his hand, guiding the movements of their lips as if taking the lead in a dance, she realizes, _This is how adults kiss. This is how a man kisses a woman. Soon it will begin to feel natural. We are friends and colleagues, and now we’ll be lovers too. This is it. My life is finally beginning._

The kiss breaks apart because Gerard is smiling, shaking his head with an expression of joy and wonder. His thumb strokes her cheek as if touching something precious. His dæmon is still trembling in her cage.

“What’s funny?” Marisa asks.

“You little fool,” he answers with affection. “Can’t you see I’m in love with you?”

She’s uncertain how to respond to this, so she smiles and hugs his neck and kisses him again, because it feels good and keeps him quiet, and now that they’ve done it once doing it again makes little difference. There’s a tightness in his mouth now, and his both his hands are at her waist, holding her a stiffly as if there’s something more he’d like to say, but before he can the anbaric overhead lamp comes on, flooding the room with ugly yellow light. He shoves her abruptly away.

“Gerard, what’s the meaning of this?” someone cries just outside.

It’s a man of about fifty, with dark hair sparsely dusting a bulbous forehead. His thin, angular face is twisted in pain. He wears a long beaver fur coat against which his muskrat dæmon all but disappears. His eyes must normally be the sad, soft eyes a cow has, but now they’re bright with passionate tears.

Strangely, Bonneville laughs. He comes to the interloper, resting his forearms familiarly on the man’s shoulders, hands folded behind his neck. The muskrat lumbers to the floor to avoid his touch. “François, you should have told me you were coming! My poor assistant got a little carried away, I think, hm?” He takes the man’s chin and gently tips it up so he’s forced to look in his eyes.

Marisa has seen enough. She snaps her fingers low at her side to get her dæmon’s attention, and he snatches her coat from the chair as she brushes past the men and out of the lab. “You smell like _girl_ , you son of a whore,” François is saying as she crosses the catwalk.

The monkey totters after her on his bandy legs, long arms raised high to keep the Astrakhan from dragging. She takes it and he scampers briskly on all fours. She’s sure they’d better make themselves scarce. She scoops him into her arms as she lets herself out of the warehouse. At the same moment the door locks behind her, she registers snowflakes falling on her face.

With the monkey clinging to her breast, she unfurls a bright silk scarf from her pocket and wraps her hair and throat. This was a Christmas gift from Marcel, and it’s elegant and tasteful, as Marcel himself will someday grow up to be. The pattern is stylized lily of the valley on a deep blue ground, whiplash-curved stems tipped with tiny poisonous blossoms. There are delicate blue leather gloves in her pockets too. Already her toes are beginning to itch with cold inside her boots.

Habit makes her glance at her stopped wristwatch, and she hisses in irritation. It can’t be much later than four and dusk is already gathering. She should go home, but the prospect is a dreary one, no fitting end to her adventure. There’s still no traffic on this street, and the snowfall absorbs ambient sound so that although a few blocks away the city teems with life, this environment feels static as a photogram, and lonesome as the North Pole.

“You’re not frightened?” the monkey says. “For all you know that man might come up here in a jealous rage and kill us.”

She smiles faintly. “Do you suppose that was François Garnier?”

“Has to be.”

“That means my mother is his brother’s mistress. We’re practically family.”

“What if he tells her?”

“Then I’ll… I don’t know… I suppose I’ll tell her he forced himself on me.”

“He did.”

“Then that will make it all the easier to say,” she snaps, sniffling because the cold is making her nose run. In this moment, the monkey pities his young woman terribly. He wishes his own love were enough to protect her from the love human men wield like a weapon, but of course he is she, they are each other, so his devotion to her counts for very little.

“Do you think he meant it?” the monkey says at last. There’s no need to ask what.

“He’s a grown man. Surely he knows his own mind.”

“That hyena worries me. They both do.”

“You sound just like Marcel. You see something unfamiliar and you want to run away and hide behind Maman’s skirts. If he loves us he won’t want to hurt us… Not every dæmon can be as pretty as you are, darling, but he’s very handsome, you know. And think of all he and I could accomplish together…”

Neither of them will bother to point out the obvious asymmetry in this hypothetical partnership. Marisa knows she doesn’t love as other people do. She feels attraction, desire, admiration, curiosity, and all these she’s sure she feels for Bonneville, but she cannot love him with the divine love of altruism and self-renunciation, the kind of love that writes songs and launches ships, the kind people die for, any more than she can breathe underwater. She has no expectation that she will ever love in that way. She suspects such love is a sign of weakness, and her deficit grieves her not at all.

“Behind the door,” the monkey says sharply, his ears pricking. Marisa flattens herself to the wall as the handle clanks from inside and the heavy steel groans open. She’s prepared to fight if it’s Garnier and he means trouble, but it’s the hyena who shuffles out first. Then the door swings shut to reveal Bonneville, in the process of lighting a cigarette, and when he spots Marisa he jumps, burning his fingers, dropping the match in the snow. She laughs at him—she’s nervous and it just spills out of her—and after a moment he joins in.

Raising his eyebrows he indicates the cigarette, and she hesitates for a second and then nods. Bonneville holds up a finger, squats to roll another, lights it from the first, and then passes it to her. Still trembling with anxious laughter, she takes an irregular, self-conscious drag. Steam rises from her mouth with the smoke and tricks her into exhaling too long. They stare together at the dissolving sky.

“I can’t go home,” Marisa says at last.

“I can’t let you go,” Gerard agrees, not looking at her. “It’s too dangerous in this weather.”

“I certainly can’t stay here.”

“No indeed.” He pauses. He’s allowing her the opportunity to propose something, but nothing comes to mind, so finally he says: “I’m sorry about what happened in there.”

“Which part?”

He sighs. “Between us, I mean. I hadn’t thought it through. I’d been worried sick about you, you see, and when you finally came back, I… well. I won’t say I didn’t mean what I said. But I won’t bring it up again. Not unless you ask.”

In a way Marisa finds this show of selflessness rather touching, because she’s found that a confession of love is normally followed by a reproach, but the monkey is pinching crossly at her breast: they both know a martyred tone when they hear one. A demand can’t be far behind.

“What happened to your friend?” she asks.

“You mean François? Well, it’s his building as I think I mentioned, although his sister-in-law’s name is on the deed, and the turnkey must be pacified, mustn’t he. I managed to calm him some. He probably toddled up to his office to appraise something. Never mind him. I’ve a pied-à-terre only ten minutes’ walk from here. It’s small but pretty well stocked with books and drink, just the thing for waiting out a snowstorm. If you need it the sofa in the library is wonderful for sleeping. I’ve been known to take advantage of it myself just for the sake of variety.”

“I don’t know. I’d better call Maman if I stay out much later.”

“There’s a pay telephone in the lobby. Oh, do come, Marisa. I wouldn’t be a gentleman if I didn’t insist.”

“And are you? A gentleman?”

“More or less.” He offers his arm. She accepts it.

As they walk she describes her adventure in detail, omitting the part about the window in the drainage pipe for reasons she can't quite explain. He marvels at her courage and resourcefulness, those qualities of hers which too few people notice. She feels very close to him now because they share an extraordinary secret. In a way it’s a greater risk, a greater commitment, than his confession in the laboratory: he chose her, no one else, to take part in his great discovery. But as soon as she’s thought that she wonders whether it’s really true. She brings the conversation back around to Garnier.

“Does he have any idea the sort of work you’re doing in his building?”

“None at all,” Bonneville says, looking disgusted.

“Hadn’t you better tell him? What if you were hurt or…?”

This line of questioning is making him angry. He stops walking to look her in the eye. “Listen carefully, Marisa, because I won’t say this again. It is not a game, my work on the Rusakov field. I know it, the Magisterium knows it, and since you’re involved you had damn well better know it too. If what happened to Rusakov happens to me the field of experimental theology will be set back by decades. It’s possible it would never recover. So if you breathe a word of it to anyone, _anyone_ , you’ll wish you were dead, do you understand? Anything you say about me will implicate you as well, remember, and what’s more it won’t be only us that suffers. I haven’t any family to speak of, but you do. Mrs. Delamare might be easy to turn. What about your brother? He adores you. He wouldn’t betray you without a fight. Imagine what they’d have to do to break him. Have you any idea what the church used to do to adolescent boys in the Middle Ages? What do you suppose they do now?” He’s holding her by the shoulders, glaring fiercely, so stern she almost wonders if he’s putting her on. When she doesn’t speak, he gives her a little shake. “Do you understand? We’re not fucking around here!”

“Do I look like I’m fucking around?” she snaps. The monkey bares his teeth at the hyena and she snarls in response but doesn't pounce. “I was the one who went through your window, remember? You’re scared of _prison_? I put my life in your hands! For all I knew I could have died there! So don’t insult me.”

Unexpectedly he loosens his grip, and smiles fondly as if they’d been joking all the time. He can’t seem to meet her eyes. “Very good. Besides,” he adds as he taps the nonexistent ash off his cigarette, “François is not like us. He has no mind at all for science. I couldn’t begin to explain it to him if I wanted to. He’s hopeless. I told him I’m down there every day turning lead into gold.”

“You didn’t.” Marisa can’t help laughing now the tension is broken.

“I did. I think he suspected I was pulling his leg but he was too embarrassed to ask… Look, this is my place.”

Snow is already banked in loose, dry puffs around the front doors, and when they enter they bring plenty of the weather in with them. The building’s lobby is lit only by the pale glow of blizzard that comes through the smutty windows. The tiled floor is chipped, and the hallway reeks forbiddingly of piss.

“Don’t look so worried. It grows on you,” Gerard laughs, but in fact it already has: it’s just the sort of place a mad genius ought to live.

He lights a match and holds it near the telephone so she can see to dial her number. Maman answers, perfectly nonchalant. “Marisa, dear heart, I was just beginning to wonder where you were. You’d better come home right this instant, they’re saying the weather’s getting nasty.”

“Yes, Maman, that’s why I’m calling. Do you remember I told you I’d be helping Dr. Bonneville in his chapel at the university today?” It’s not precisely a lie: she _did_ tell Maman this. “Well, we got stuck in the snowstorm. I don’t think there’s any way for me to get home until it clears. But the good news is Dr. Bonneville lives very nearby, and he’s got a guest room, and he said I’m welcome to stay until it’s safe for me to go home. All right?”

Marisa is hopeful that the difference in their ages, as well as Bonneville’s ostensible mentorship role, might ease the prohibition against men and women mixing in private, but the objection Maman raises is one she didn’t anticipate.

“I want to talk to you about Dr. Bonneville, as a matter of fact, darling. Marcel tells me the man’s a homosexual.” _Of course he did, the little bastard._ To calm herself Marisa imagines her dæmon tearing Clothilde’s wings off. “Now I realize such people can’t really help what they are,” Maman continues in a tone of magnanimity, “And it’s good of him to take an interest in your future, but really, who knows what kind of immorality he might thoughtlessly expose you to? And they so often carry disease…”

“Please, Maman, I’m sure he’ll be perfectly proper. Here, would you like to speak to him yourself?” She passes the telephone to Gerard without waiting for the reply. Maman rarely says no to a man.

“Yes? Mrs. Delamare?” he says, shooting Marisa a puzzled look as he cradles the receiver on his shoulder. “Uh huh. Yes, perfectly. No, it’s really no trouble at all… If anything I should be the one to apologize, since working for me was what got her stranded to begin with… Of course. Of course. She’ll be quite safe—I’ll look after her as I would my own daughter… Yes, thank you, I certainly will. Goodbye.” He winks at Marisa. She can hear Maman still talking as he hangs up.

Once upstairs, Marisa understands why Gerard never referred to his living quarters as an “apartment”: the space is clearly not designed for habitation. It’s frigid, with monstrously high ceilings and windows to match. There are few walls, and even these are really just partitions, since they don’t reach all the way to the top. The only enclosed area is the lavatory/darkroom in a corner near the stairwell, and his “bedroom” is perched atop that, accessible only by a ladder, which he does not invite her to climb. In fact, playing host, Gerard is in every way a gentleman, presumably to compensate for his earlier lapse in decorum.

“I hoped you were bringing me someplace I could take my coat off,” she teases him.

“I’ll start a fire in the stove now. But it’s warmer in the darkroom, if you’d prefer to wait in there.”

She would not. The idea of being shut up alone in a strange place suddenly reminds her of that other world, and makes her uneasy. Instead she sits at his kitchen table and picks at its chipped enamel, kicking her damp boots off and tucking her cold toes beneath her. Once the fire’s lit, Gerard brings her a big woolen blanket, olive drab, and fills a stovetop percolator from a mop sink.

“Oh, _coffee_?” she mimics him.

“Decaf if you prefer,” he says blandly, his back to her. “Either variety comes with a bonus.” He hands a bottle of dark golden liquor down from the top of a cabinet and sets it in front of her. Scotch whisky.

“Regular will be fine,” she smiles, but her hands are shaking. She pulls out the cork and sips straight from the bottle.

“Easy!” he replies with irritation, passing her a mug. “My home isn’t _that_ primitive.”

Marisa might beg to differ, especially when she sees that his “library” is half cinderblock shelves. Two upturned milk crates side by side serve for a table, and opposite the admittedly luxurious sofa, a large horsehair-stuffed cushion made from threadbare carpet scraps takes the place of a chair. On the floor he sets an oil lamp turned low, and after taking the _Œdipus_ from his satchel and replacing it reverently on the shelf, he fetches apples and farmer’s cheese from the icebox, along with a loaf of bread warmed on the stove, and a jar of artichoke hearts preserved in olive oil. She’s ravenous and feeding her delights him. Again she has the feeling that her life has just now begun.

While they talk his dæmon circles hers curiously. There’s something lascivious about her ugly grin, and from time to time she pokes her muzzle right into the monkey’s face, or snuffles at his feet and jabs her nose underneath him as if trying to flip him over. He endures this for some time, not wishing to appear unfriendly, but finally he’s had enough and scurries up the arm of the sofa, perching out of reach on the crest rail by Marisa’s head.

“I’ll bring you a pair of my pajamas,” Bonneville suggests, rising.

The loft isn’t so high he can’t climb up without his dæmon, but it’s close: the whole time he’s up there the hyena paces at the foot of the ladder, whining. The pajamas he fetches are lavender flannel ticking, and like all of his things they’re well-used but of such good quality that the wear only makes them more charming. He gives her some woolen socks, too, and tucks the blanket around her shoulders, and praises her courage again. Then he takes the lamp and a book with him into the kitchen, and she drifts off, stuffed and drunk and deliriously happy, to the sound of his pencil scratching in the margins.

She wakes to find him standing over her.

Without opening her eyes, she knows he’s there: she can smell him, sense the change in the atmosphere of the room when he came in. His dæmon is wheezing as she does when she’s trying not to cackle. Content to be admired like Snow White in a glass coffin, she composes her expression into that of a blissful sleeper.

He leans close to her. At first she thinks he’s going to kiss her forehead, but instead he fumbles delicately at her neck. Mystified, she maintains her pretense of unconsciousness. Then he folds back the unbuttoned pajama top, exposing her breast.

The monkey is conscious now, too, but he knows better than to give any sign. Behind her back, where Bonneville won’t see, Marisa grasps his fur in a tight fist. His thoughts are as much a jumble as her own. Perhaps thirty seconds pass, and nothing happens but the hyena’s labored breathing, and Bonneville’s scent, vetiver and cigarette ash, hanging sharply in the icy air. She feels the warmth of his hand over her just before his fingers graze her skin.

The very end of a fingernail brushes her, followed by the soft pad of a fingertip. The thumb descends to pinch, then to pluck, so lightly it could almost be a dream.

Apparently unsatisfied with the results of this, he rolls her nipple slowly between his thumb and finger. She doesn’t need to look to recognize the gesture because she’s seen it a dozen times before: it’s the same one he uses to roll a cigarette.

She should stop him, of course, for this is certainly predatory behavior, but in the moment the outrage feels very abstract. The damage has been done—it makes no difference now if she allows it to go on a moment longer, basking in his focus, pushing the confusion and violation aside to enjoy the latent shock of pleasure. He pauses, perhaps admiring his work.

Marisa grunts and shifts her posture so the flannel falls back over her, trying to give the impression of near-wakefulness, but as soon as she stills he impatiently uncovers her again. She hears the wet sound of his mouth opening, as if he’s licking his lips. The fingertip returns, bracingly cold now: he’s smearing her with his saliva.

Bonneville bends so low she can feel each puff of breath. Then he blows cold air across her, and the wet skin turns to ice.

She gasps, and her eyes open, and they stare at each other in silence.

“I’ve disturbed you,” he says, utterly calm. “Forgive me.” He reaches for her chest again and she moves back, but he smiles indulgently and finishes the gesture, rebuttoning her pajama shirt up to the neck. _I’ll look after her as I would my own daughter_ , he’d said. “These buttons are so worn they don’t stay fast. I thought I could fix them without waking you. You looked _very_ cold,” he adds with what she could swear is a smirk. “Go back to sleep.”

The incurious, virginal smile comes to her lips as effortlessly as ever.

With her arms crossed and the monkey clutched over her chest, she listens closely to Bonneville moving through his rooms: opening and closing a book from the shelf, smoking a cigarette, brushing his teeth and pissing with the bathroom door open, and the hyena’s claws tapping on the uneven floorboards. Finally Marisa hears him heft his dæmon over his shoulders—she fights the urge to peek at how he does it—and he climbs the ladder up to his bed.

The monkey is in her mind now, urging her to go. Marisa places him on the floor and he stealthily peeks into the loft, and she feels his relief to find Bonneville asleep. She forces herself to move slow and silent, bracing herself to strip in the cold, grimacing as she squirms into her damp street clothes.

As she folds the woolen blanket over the back of the sofa, her dæmon climbs the bookshelf and tugs loose the third volume of the _Œdipus Ægyptiacus_. “Hssst, Marisa,” he says.

Tucking her hair behind her ears, she takes the book and opens it to the page that shows the child-god Harpocrates. Most of the char marks in the facing pages have been scraped away, leaving a hollow space in the center of the book so that it resembles a treasure-box. The bits of lead type are inside. She scoops them into her coat pocket.

Then she places the book back on the shelf and flees Bonneville’s building, intending never to return.


	5. Marisa

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "Through his passion nature has given man into woman’s hands, and the woman who does not know how to make him her subject, her slave, her toy, and how to betray him with a smile in the end is not wise." — _Venus in Furs_ , Leopold von Sacher-Masoch

There’s no telling what time of night it is. The lovely star-flung sky peeking through grayish clouds could belong to any hour between five in the evening and eight the following day. For the umpteenth time she checks her watch and finds it stopped, and with a little shriek of frustration she rips it off her wrist and flings it into a pristine snowbank. Dutifully, the monkey runs to retrieve it, and at the same time he tucks it in her pocket he draws out her scarf and wraps up her bare neck against the cold. His little heart is bursting with pride, which he hides to spare her embarrassment. She was brave to step into that unknown world, but that was the bravery of nihilism, bought by not caring what happened to her. The decision to turn her back on Bonneville is different: it’s the courage of a woman who wants to live.

“It’s stopped snowing,” he observes with studied indifference.

“Thank God for that. Still, I don’t relish the thought of the walk home.”

“No indeed.”

“And suppose he should wake and find us gone.”

“He might think nothing of it at all.”

“Or he might call Maman, asking where we are.”

They both fall silent for a moment, as the disastrous possibility sinks in.

“There’s traffic on that street over there,” the monkey suggests at last. “Maybe we could beg for a ride.”

This plan seems promising enough, and it’s not long before a luxurious car pulls over in response to her plaintive wave, and the rear door opens invitingly. But just when she’s at the point of entering, her bones aching for the warmth and softness of those rich seats, the well-dressed man inside looks her over and says pleasantly, “ _Soixant-quinze_?”

She slams the door in his face, and the fine car rolls away before the monkey can remind her to be smart.  
  
“Now you’ve done it,” he says grimly, watching its tail lights recede.

“You can piss off, too.”

“We wouldn’t need to go through with anything. Just string him along for a bit. Get us across the river, at least.”

“Easy for you to say. I’d rather walk,” she sniffs, but a half-mile later when she can’t feel her nose she concedes it might be worth another try. There’s little she can do to look less like a streetwalker—she cannot change the location or the hour or her sex—but she huddles her slight shoulders until her bosom all but disappears, and combs her hair into the deep side-part of a schoolgirl. She experiments with walking slightly pigeon-toed, bunching her stockings around her ankles. Instead of waving, she glances innocently at each car that passes, and if those inside look like men of means she hides her face.

The next car that stops is an off-duty cab. “Are you all right, Mademoiselle?” he calls to her through his cracked-open window.

“Oh, Monsieur—I’m lost, you see, and—“ Her voice falters, raw from the cold, which gives it a panicked, childish edge. She hugs her dæmon to her chest and shakes her head hard as if fighting tears.

“There, there, you’re safe now,” the driver says, and his tone is gentle but hasty, so she realizes he’s afraid to see her cry. His retriever dæmon, sitting alert in the backseat, wags her tail encouragingly. “Where are you headed?”

Cautiously, she names an intersection not far from Maman’s building.

“Would you like me to drive you there?”  
  
“That’s very kind of you to offer, Monsieur, but I haven’t any money.”

“I won’t hear of it. I’m going in that direction anyhow. Besides, I have a girl your age—about thirteen, are you?—and I’d hope someone would do the same for her. Your papa must be worried sick.”

It’s only because it’s late, she’s very tired, and there’s a chill deep in her bones, but now as she gets into the heated cab at last Marisa finds herself shedding real tears. _To hell with him and his precious daughter,_ she thinks passionately. _I hope they choke on it_. “I don’t think he will be,” she mumbles, telling him the truth now out of spite. “He doesn’t even know I went out.”

All the way to her apartment the driver maintains a lively generic patter, trying to calm her, and she keeps crying because she enjoys how uncomfortable it seems to make him. He gives her a bar of chocolatl he’d been saving for breakfast. She eats it slowly and the process dries her tears, and his pleasure at thinking he’s cheered her up is so intoxicating that after that she can’t resist pretending to be happy. When he pulls up in front of her building she even goes so far as to wrap her arms around his neck and plant a sticky kiss on his cheek, enthusing, “Bless you, Monsieur, bless you!” His reaction to this is cooler than she’d hoped, and he looks at her strangely as she waves goodbye from the door.

Once she gets into the lift she shakes out her scarf, and immediately knows why he looked at her that way. He was kind to her because he had mistaken her for somebody’s little girl. When he hugged her he had smelled nobody’s woman.

She draws a bath, pouring Maman’s sweet-scented Epsom salts with a liberal hand. The monkey perches by the head of the tub facing the taps so he can talk to her without seeming to stare.

“Will we tell him about the other windows? The one in the pipe?”

Marisa tips her head back as she sinks into the water, until only her face protrudes. “He might be foolish enough to tell us everything he knows,” she says placidly. “That doesn’t mean we have to do the same. _We_ discovered that window. It’s ours, not his.”

“To do what with? How can we use it, without his finding out?”  
  
“We remove him,” she declares, then takes a breath and drops beneath the surface.  
  
They get into bed with Marcel, and Clothilde wakes briefly, opening one skeptical eye, but closes it again when she sees that nothing’s wrong. Marisa slips her arms around the sleeping boy, and finds him so unexpectedly small: a pliable stalk of bamboo, a crescent moon. His room is just beginning to grow light, tinting the walls a soft and fragile lilac.

“Did you have a nightmare?”

“Yes.”

His delicate hand emerges from the covers and strokes her wet hair. “Safe now,” he mumbles. To be petted and soothed like this by Maman would turn her stomach, but she cannot be disgusted by Marcel. Instead she merely pities him for loving her, and then admires the pity, and then sleeps.

Bonneville’s panicked phone call comes at noon. “Lazy thing,” the monkey says in an undertone, and Marisa shushes him because it costs all of her concentration to play the role she’s devised for herself.

“I hope you weren’t worried, my dear,” she purrs, and her voice is like the beautiful opalescent swirls on an oil slick. “It was so early, I didn’t see the point in waking you. I called a cab from your lobby and he brought me straight home, and to be honest I bathed and went right back to sleep in my own bed. But how thoughtless of me not to leave a note.”

“Well, as long as you’re all right, then,” he says gruffly. He’s groping for a reason to keep her on the line, to be reassured his secrets are still safe.

“Quite all right, yes.” Here she inserts a coy pause. “Oh, except for one thing.”

“What’s that?” he says sharply.  
  
“I rather hoped we could do it again.”

An audible sigh of relief sizzles through the receiver.

“All right. Perhaps I could take you to dinner? Are you busy Thursday?”

“Thursday? Let me see,” she says, then puts her hand over the phone transmitter and counts ten. “Thursday’s no good. Listen, I know it’s awfully soon, but would tomorrow do?”

“I—tomorrow?”

“Yes, you see I’m going back to Oxford next weekend, and there’s just so much to take care of before then, I don’t think we’ll have another chance. But promise you won’t be sick of me, Gerard, after seeing me so often. If you will be, I won’t come.”

“Sick of you?” He’s goggling like a moron. She’s going to have to lead him by the nose. How could she ever have thought this man brilliant? He might be a gifted physicist but it’s obvious how he struggles to keep up with her. _The field of experimental theology might never recover from his loss, he said. We’ll see_.

“Of me, yes. I assure you I can be quite dull.”

The foolish smile comes through plainly in his voice. “I could never find you dull, Marisa.”

“Well, as long as you’re sure.”

“Tomorrow, then. I’ll come get you at eight.”

Maman was disgruntled by her daughter’s willfulness, but a few submissive words placate her easily. Once the weather began to clear, Marisa humbly explains, she came straight back to the apartment, for even if he is a homosexual, and even though he was a perfect gentleman, it didn’t seem right to spend the night alone with a man not of one’s own family, and after all, there’s no bed quite so comfortable as the familiar bed at home. Maman smiles faintly, pleased that her daughter has seen reason, and Marisa, nauseated, takes solace from pride in her performance. She had masterfully concealed how badly the words “at home,” when applied to this place, hurt her throat.

“That reminds me,” Maman breezily adds, “M. Garnier and his brother will be stopping by tomorrow evening. It’s all right if you want to visit with them a bit, but do take care not to be too underfoot.”

“What do you suppose I said that reminded her?” Marisa mutters to her brother when Maman swans off to dress.

He covers his mouth with his hands to suppress a snort. “I’m sure I can’t guess.”

Of all the places Bonneville has taken her, the restaurant he selects for their dinner is by far the most respectable, and because he had seemed to enjoy her voracity she doesn’t pretend she’s not hungry as she might do at home. The pocket money she got for Christmas is tucked safely inside her shoe, but he doesn’t flinch at her spendthrift order: apparently his money woes are a thing of the past. In return, she gently encourages him to drink more than is his natural inclination, the better to interrogate him, but she needn’t have bothered, she realizes: her sudden fascination with him he seems to regard as only his due. She wants to learn all she can from him before they part ways, which will be very soon.

“You asked me once why I wanted to study experimental theology,” she says over the last of her _ris du veau_ , “but I realized I never asked you the same question. How you chose your field.”

“A predilection for maths,” he shrugs.

“That’s not very romantic.”

“Science isn’t romantic.”

“Indeed it is. Of course it is. It’s the fascination with mystery, the thrill of pursuit, occasionally a glimpse of the sublime. When did you first feel that?”

He grins into his soup. “You won’t believe me.”

“At this point I think I’d be a fool to doubt you.”

“You’re a fool not to.”

“So I can’t win. So tell me.”

“As a boy I was kicked in the head by a horse.”

A sudden laugh leaps from her throat. “I’m sorry. Is that why you’re so bad-tempered?”

“Yes,” he says matter-of-factly. “I was unconscious for three days. When I awoke—two things—first, they said I was intolerably unpleasant. My mother hardly recognized me. And second, I began to be aware that there are things in our world—objects, places, even people—that do not belong. They are somehow discordant. I can’t explain how I knew this, I just knew.”

“Go on.”

“Of course I could tell no one. They already thought me half-mad. A china elephant or a spare button would agitate me almost to the point of tears. So, I taught myself to control my fear, and I channeled it into study.”

“And that ability was what first drew you to the book?”

“Yes. I sensed it, like a false note in a choir.” He eyes her with an unaccustomed shrewdness. “Funny. Sometimes I sense the same false note in you.”

Marisa smiles blandly as if she thinks he’s paying her a compliment. The handful of lead type she stole from him is still in her pocket. At her nudge the monkey oozes down the seat to idly stroke the hyena’s ears and brow, and Gerard gives a sigh of pleasure, then shakes his head to dispel the errant thought. His hand lies half-curled on the tablecloth, and Marisa reaches for it, gently lacing her fingers through his.

“And did you never want to go there yourself?” she murmurs, tapping his palm with her thumb.

“It’s not possible now. Not yet,” Gerard hedges, staring blankly at his hand in hers. “Someone else would need to operate the device, and…” He trails off when he sees she’s smiling at him, her eyebrows raised, just short of triumphant. “Oh no, Marisa, not you. That’s out of the question.”

She clutches his hand eagerly. “Why? You could easily show me how.”

“But you saw what it’s like. It’s terribly painful. Both you and your dæmon—I couldn’t ask you to. I couldn’t allow it.”

In response Marisa reaches across the table for his steak knife. She raises it in her fist and, before he can do more than cringe, plunges it into the meat of her own bare forearm. Her smile doesn’t waver. She doesn’t look down, but she feels the wound smarting, the cold finger trickling up her skin. She drops the knife with a clatter.

“Jesus!” Gerard cries, hurriedly pressing his napkin to her arm. “Was that necessary?”

“I’m not afraid of pain,” she says. The monkey is wiping slaver from the hyena’s chin. She’s wheezing softly, and a glitter of excitement is dancing in Gerard’s golden eyes.

“Very well,” he says slowly. “Perhaps you and he could learn to power the device. You’re forgetting how conspicuous I am. It’s true I haven’t been there but I’ve read their books, I’ve opened peepholes and spied. A hyena walking around in that world would be liable to cause a riot.”

“We could do it late at night, when there would be no one to see you,” she says, leaning closer. “Gerard, we could do it now. We won’t have another chance.”

His hands are clutched tightly in hers, and his face is twitching with indecision, his crooked teeth slightly bared. She makes sure he sees her looking at his mouth. The monkey’s caresses have grown openly lascivious; he rakes his small black fingers through the thick fur of the hyena’s neck, and Gerard can’t help but feel it. His eyelids flutter briefly closed, and when they open again Marisa knows he’ll come. She smiles conspiratorially, raising her eyebrows, prompting him to pronounce his own sentence.

He signs for the waiter to bring the check.

The warehouse is pitch-dark and very cold. Most of the building was never wired for anbaricity, Gerard explains. The bulb just inside the door they enter by is enough to light their progress down the stairs, but once they turn the corner to the arched hallway they’re forced to pause and allow their eyes to adjust to the shadows. Puffs of breath hang ghostlike in the stagnant air. Marisa gropes for Gerard’s hand. He turns to her and smiles reassuringly. “Ready?”

“Ready.”

A slim finger of moonlight from a broken window illuminates the underground river and the laboratory beyond. The catwalk casts a grated shadow, and it’s so silent now that they can hear the sound of the water, an ominous trickle, like a ship that’s sinking. They cross hand-in-hand.

“Cover your eyes,” Gerard says gently, a moment before he flicks the lights on.

This time he walks her through the steps, loaning her a smock to protect her evening dress and making her crouch beside him to open the gas canister that powers his steam engine. Over the rising hum of the generator he explains the control panel inside the Faraday cage, and on a notepad he writes the proper readings for the gauges. Then he unscrews a large glass vial from the frame of the cyclotron. Holding it close to his face, he taps it critically. A few flakes of ash jump inside.

“The _Œdipus_ is still at my place, but there might still be enough material left here to make it work. If not, I can always run home quickly and—“

“Will this do?” Marisa takes a piece of lead type from her pocket and holds it out to him.

He looks at her strangely then. He knows she’s up to something, he just hasn’t figured out what. She forces her face to relax into a guileless smile, but he says nothing, only takes the piece of type from her hand, examines it and nods. Then he drops the piece into the test tube and slots it back into place.

“Once that meter on the left reaches 80, you can level off the generator output by adjusting these here, and press this switch to power the cyclotron. If it goes over 90 you’ll need to adjust the pressure gauge. Do you remember how?” She nods. “Good. I suppose that’s it, then.” Gerard sighs, looking anxiously around the lab. He places a hand on her shoulder. “Are you ready?”

They’re near enough to one another for her to feel how the heat of his body cuts the chilly air. She places her cold hands on either side of his neck, and pulls him down to kiss her. His lips brush hers very cautiously. He’s trembling. “Marisa…” he starts to say, but she stops his mouth with her own and grabs his shoulders so he can’t get away. The power she wields over him now is intoxicating. He relents at once, returning the kiss passionately, as if it would hurt him not to. His strong arms go around her and his fingers are in her hair, deep soft grunts of pleasure in his throat; he smells of water lily and tastes of the rotten vines beneath.

“Time enough for that later, my love,” she reminds him at last. Wide-eyed, he nods. The cyclotron drones rhythmically and the air is crackling. She passes the small metal bar to her dæmon, and when Gerard glances at the cage in the corner and starts to speak she puts up her hand. “He can control himself without that, can’t you, darling?” In response the monkey clutches the bar tightly and glares at her. The hyena is nervously whining.

Marisa steps into the Faraday cage, checks the dials, and nods at Gerard. “One hour, all right?”

“One hour!” he shouts back, checking his watch.

She grabs the contact point and completes the circuit.

The lights flicker and she can’t help but scream as the anbaric current seizes her fist, locking it into place. She looks to her dæmon and his little face is so fierce and resolute it gives her strength to set the pain aside. There’s a noise, like a groan or a tear, and the window opens on the wall. The hyena is giggling hysterically. Gerard says something to her, she looks up at him with adoration, and as one they step through.

Marisa grits her teeth to keep quiet while he looks around him in wonder, and then he dashes across the brand-new catwalk, a boy turned loose in a candy shop. When he reaches the far side she calls to him.

“Gerard, wait,” she cries. He turns back, uncomprehending. In spite of the pain, she smiles at him sweetly, warmly, as someone who loved him might smile, and holds up the bar for him to see.

Then she lets go. His face falls. He disappears.

Marisa and her dæmon stare at the sheet of charred metal tacked to the wall, blank and impenetrable and faintly smoking. She laughs, an innocent burble of joy.

“I don’t think in all the world there’s ever been a woman half so false,” the monkey gasps, but in a tone of incalculable pride. Then he sets about destroying every piece of equipment he can get his hands on: ripping out wires, breaking glass, unfastening screws and tossing them over his shoulder. Marisa rifles through Bonneville’s desk and takes anything that looks interesting, leaving the rest in disarray.

“Hsst, let’s go,” she whispers, and the monkey drops a cable mid-gnaw and leaps into her arms. As they creep over the catwalk in the dark, an intensely vulgar stream of invective flows from beneath them, ghostly as it floats over the sluggish water, punctuated by a hyena’s delirious cackle, and then a series of yelps as he kicks her. Working as quietly as they can, Marisa and her dæmon collect broken bricks from the decaying walls, blocking the drainage pipe until the lost man’s voice is muffled beyond recognition, and then they flee down the lightless hallway, and Marisa is so elated she thinks she can see in the dark.

At a prearranged spot a block away, a hired car is waiting for her. The seats are deep and warm, and she tips the driver generously, in exchange for which he keeps his thoughts to himself.

François Garnier regards her with intense suspicion when she enters Maman’s apartment forty minutes later. The last time they met she ran from him, but after the night she’s had this sad-eyed little man can’t hope to intimidate her. His brother blithely introduces him to his rival, so she knows he hasn’t told.

“Mademoiselle Delamare is a student of one of the women’s colleges in Oxford. She’s been helping Gerard with his work a bit over her winter break. You want to become an experimental theologian yourself one day, don’t you, my dear?”

“Yes, that’s right,” she says brightly, as if his condescension were in the least justified. She turns to François, and smiles as she shakes his hand. “Then you know Dr. Bonneville?”

“Better than you do.”  
  
“I had hoped we could talk about that.”

François gives her a look that could kill. It hits her face like a sunbeam.

Rather than negligently pimping as Gerard had done, François actually attempts to involve himself in the conversation between Maman and his brother, which Marisa finds vaguely pitiable. _They’ll end the night in bed together no matter what you do_ , she wants to tell him. People roll into each other’s arms with the senseless inevitability of rocks into a canyon, tidal waves swallowing towns, and yet François seems determined to position himself as a breakwater. When an innuendo is served, he intervenes with a word or two to deaden its momentum before it can be returned. If the couple looks like they might be about to touch, he presses wine into the reaching hand. The doomed nobility of it annoys her.

“I’m afraid there was a terrible misunderstanding at Dr. Bonneville’s lab the other day,” she says, staring into the dark pool between her palms to hide her smirk.

“I don’t think there was.” He’s not going to make this easy.

Marisa shrugs, feigning diffidence. “That’s fair. I don’t know what I expected, going there alone with him. It’s a mistake I won’t make again.”

“No, I’m sure you won’t,” Garnier scoffs, with the faintest emphasis on _you_. His voice is bitter but it only lends him dignity: the dignity of bitter vegetables and ugly buildings, the dignity of pain. His muskrat dæmon sits glaring in his lap, and his legs are crossed, the bony ankle exposed in its golden-yellow sock. She realizes what she witnessed was no mere sexual transaction, but an unrequited love. What misfortune for Garnier, but what a stroke of luck for her. She sits up straighter, adjusts her approach.

“He told me it’s your building, is that true?”

“I don’t own the building. It belongs to my sister-in-law’s family. But I have the use of it, so long as Bertrand remains in her good graces.” He glances ruefully at his blushing, faithless brother.

“The work Dr. Bonneville is doing—well, you must know all about it.”  
  
“Of course I do.” Such hopeless pride.

Marisa pitches her voice very low. “Frankly, I wish he’d never told me. In Oxford research like that would mean excommunication at the very least for everyone involved. It frightens me even to have knowledge of it. If someone asked—”

“Don’t lie to protect him, Mlle. Delamare. I assure you he wouldn’t do the same for you.”

“I’ve no intention of protecting him, and I might offer you the same advice, but better still if it never comes to that. If I were you, I’d have his equipment removed from the premises at once, before the CCD can raid the place and you take the blame for his heresy. You must realize that’s what he had planned all along.”

“How dare you threaten me? What impertinence—“

“Good night, M. Garnier. It was a pleasure talking with you, but I don't think we’ll meet again.” Marisa stands and stretches, and takes her mother’s hands. “I’m awfully sleepy, Maman. These late nights don’t agree with me at all.”

Maman becomes suddenly radiant with the pretense of maternal concern. She strokes her daughter’s blushing cheek, which is soft and pink like a rose petal, just as her own was at that age, and the girl’s eyes are innocent and bland. “Of course not, dear heart. You’re a growing girl, you need your rest. I’m sure you’ve bothered poor François quite enough, now you must run along to bed.” She offers her own hollow face for a kiss, and receives it.

In the hall, out of sight, Marisa takes off her shoes, and digs her aching toes into the plush carpet. Marcel’s bedroom light shows underneath his door, and she knocks softly.

“Yes?”

“It’s me.”

“Come in.” He’s sitting up in bed, reading a very dull-looking book. She sits at the foot of the bed and tucks her legs underneath her. Without looking up, he says, “Don’t tell me you got bored of grown-up talk.”

“In fact I did. They’re very dull, you know.”

Marcel sets the book facedown in his lap and scrutinizes her. “Even your friend Dr. Bonneville?”

Marisa snorts softly. “I don't expect to see him any more.”

“What happened?”

For an answer she places her finger to her lips, and he narrows his eyes at her but smiles too, mimicking the gesture. With his round childlike face and his owl dæmon at his side he resembles the child-god Harpocrates. She feels a little rush of affection for him, like champagne foaming over, and she tousles his hair. With a groan, he ducks out from under her hand.

She falls asleep more easily than she has in weeks. Her conscience is perfectly clear.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _Soixant-quinze?_ : Seventy-five?
> 
> Thank you for reading my first long(ish) multichap fic, and for your patience as I took my time with this final chapter. I hope it was worth the wait! 
> 
> Special thanks to my dear friends [@BitchOfTheWaste](https://archiveofourown.org/users/BitchOfTheWaste/) and [@themarrowmeal](https://archiveofourown.org/users/themarrowmeal/), and beta [@AFamiliarWitch](https://archiveofourown.org/users/AFamiliarWitch/), and to regular commenters @skatingsplits, @Rhaized, @LavenderJam, and @Alezheia. You are all absolute treasures, and your encouragement and support mean the world to me. Thank you for being a bright spot in this garbage year.


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